


BeautyslashBeast

by raedbard



Category: West Wing
Genre: M/M, Porn Battle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-02
Updated: 2011-08-02
Packaged: 2017-10-22 03:31:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/233264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What begins as a game does not end up quite a fairy tale, but perhaps close enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	BeautyslashBeast

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Porn Battle XII](http://oxoniensis.dreamwidth.org/40106.html). Prompt was 'everafter'.

BeautyslashBeast

It would strike Toby as odd, were he a different man, that of the two of them, it is he and not Sam who is better at the game of sex. As he is not that man, not one particularly given to periods of profound introspection, except during the periods of profound drunkenness which his continuing gainful employment do not really allow him anymore, it doesn’t strike him much. Though not at ease with his body, particularly, it is not his own body with which he is usually occupied when having sex -- that beauty is not his own contribution to the business just the way it should be. Not like Sam who, since he is beautiful in a way no one can argue with, rather than opaquely appealing as Toby can be but would rather not dwell on, must always be thinking about it. Toby supposes (when he considers it at all which, as discussed above, he does seldom) that this is why Sam never seems to get any.

And he feels sorry for him, really. That a boy as smart as Sam hasn’t worked all this out; that some bizarre quirk of his bizarre head has somehow convinced him that sex isn’t a good enough end in itself; that love must always come first.

As part of what he always thinks of as the grace sometimes given to those whom magazines and Hollywood casting directors will never call handsome, Toby has been given the surety that this rather slow, if lovely, young man has decided that the love (or at least some other intolerably romantic quality) which for him is always a precursor to sex rather than its fruit, the love he cannot seem to pull around himself like a heavy coat in winter, is love for Toby.

Now, this has happened before. It is another part of the strange gifts of ugliness that, unexpected out of the day, occasionally comes rising somebody who thinks that they love you. Since Toby has himself only been in love once and since he is aware that it was (is) an idiosyncratic experience, to say the least, he hesitates to draw conclusions from the fact that this always seems a very inapposite way of going about the thing.

Still, it’s not like he’s particularly picky about this stuff. As much as his occasional dabblings in homosexuality are not something he wants generally known around the office so that it can soon thereafter be generally known in D.C. and thence in the offices of all the better-known newspapers of the nation, he isn’t ashamed of it; shame has nothing to do with it. It’s just sex. And although he wouldn’t say that he has had a fair ration of that in his life (what man would say that? what woman either?), he has had enough of it to know that there isn’t as much difference between fucking a woman and fucking a man as everyone seems to think. At any rate, there isn’t for him.

It is all this that decides him that he should have another shot at getting Sam drunk and putting him to bed. This time with a little less company.

*

They have sex the way Toby thinks men should, Sam suspects. That is: carelessly, messily, with little regard for touch or kisses or the textures of the act that make its successful completion, for Sam, both the most excruciating experiences of his life, and the ones he most wants to have over again once they are gone.

Being in love does not help. Sam has always felt like it should, somehow. Like love’s magnetic resonance should be enough to overcome the awkwardness he felt when he was twelve and getting boners when he though about older boys he thought were beautiful but knew he could never touch, half out of fear, and half the awkwardness itself which took, years later, the force, the not inconsiderable weight of what he thought then was true love, to crush. He thinks -- he feels, and there really isn’t any point applying logic to this one -- that he loves Toby like this.

So they make love, no -- have sex, no -- they fuck, the way men should.

Sam never thought much about his own masculinity until he started finding other boys attractive and understanding what (in a few years, maybe) he ought to start doing about that fact. He had the crisis that the son of a macho lawyer, adulterer and secret jackass might have been expected to have. It did not occur to him until quite a while later that, even if his masculinity was all a fake, even if he was some kind of fucking nancy, some girl-boy-freak (choice words, picked from his father’s repetoire), none of that mattered. The pejoratives were not coming from his own heart; and, somehow, he knew there was nothing so very wrong with him. But self-possession, as it tends to do, took a few years to arrive.

He suspects, though without much to base it on but gut feeling, that Toby would never have had such a crisis in the first place. Though Toby overthinks, frets at, worries about, and stresses over many things, Sam feels that human relationships have never been among them. He might be wrong, but he doesn’t believe he is. Whereas Sam himself, the bleeding heart of all bleeding hearts, worries about them constantly. He can cover it but, sometimes, rather than the trade deficit or the eighth draft of a speech that’s going nowhere and will continue to do so whatever they do, it’s the way Toby looks at him sometimes, what the exact pitch of the Spaldeen against the window says about whether or not Toby can really stand having him around, that keeps Sam awake at night.

And this is love, too, he knows. It is also love that gives him the strength to stand it, or at least the bloodymindedness not to care because it might give him five more minutes with the beloved.

It is in bed, as it happens, at four in the morning, thinking this and knowing that, having embarked on this line of thought that he won’t be getting any more sleep, that Sam considers putting some real effort into hating himself. This, too, is love.

*

It becomes a game, slowly, but definitely. A game to see how he can make Sam crumble. Power is always corrupting and the power to make someone come so hard that they seem almost to faint; so hard that they clutch your arms like someone half a second from a precipitous fall down a mountain face; so hard that they think -- you both think, for a second, that they will die of it -- that is the kind of power that corrupts absolutely.

*

The sex is good. Toby is, just as Sam thought he would be, really incredibly good at fucking. Sam thinks one time he did actually faint, just like he always wondered whether he would, if Toby’s hands were ever to make their long-fabled and never _quite_ believed journey across his body. Sam finds having faith in things both difficult -- so difficult as to seem impossible -- and instinctual. His faith in Toby -- in his abilities, in his peculiar poetry, in his ascendance over everyone else who has ever played their game, in his affection, his his ability to ever show that affection in a manner that would hold off, even for a day, the hunger Sam feels for it, in his love being taken in -- is both. Sam knows that he loves like a schoolboy, and he thinks that, if he were in love with anyone other than Toby, he wouldn’t feel ashamed of that. But then he always did like making thing difficult for himself.

So the fucking is good, just as Sam knew it would be. But there is less tenderness than he expected -- than he hoped, as a secret, -- there would be. Tenderness does not equal love: even Sam isn’t soft-hearted enough to believe that it does, yet tenderness belongs to that range of feelings and so to the idea that Toby’s exterior hides, like a cracked open egg, a chest of treasure -- liquid and warm and something to be drunk down quickly, velvet in the throat, before it goes rotten. Something given to him and perhaps only to him, in the transactions of time and space and flesh they make together. But having fucked Toby (or been fucked; his side of the transaction always described even within his own head using the passive voice) drunk, sober, tired, after a whole day’s sleep, keyed up on ungodly amounts of caffeine, after a win, after a catastrophic fuck-up, even after the State of the Union (which combines all of the above, except the bit where they can remember what sleep even is), Sam has not felt gathered into Toby’s body and made warm, even by the distant fire of some affection Toby would rather die than admit. And so Sam is forced to accept that his feelings run only the one way. It is this, and the re-appearance of Andrea Wyatt, against whom he knows he has no chance whatsoever of winning in a competition, even one only Sam knows is taking place, for Toby’s heart, which decides him to leave. What happens next is, Sam thinks, just Fate’s way of fucking with him.

*

At the same time that he is trying to convince Andrea to marry him again, Toby finds that he is also missing Sam -- or, rather, the availability of Sam’s body. He doesn’t know whether this is a result of watching a woman with whom he is still in love get steadily more pregnant with his children and yet be pathetically unable to convince her to spend more than one continuous night in his bed or what it is, but he does not make him feel good about himself and, he thinks, is this is what fatherhood is going to be like before it’s even fucking started, then I’m not sure I’m really the right guy for the job. And so it is that, torn between the memory of two bodies, he sits in a darkened room in his apartment that is definitely not big enough for four people, even while two of them are still really short, and stares at the sheaf of papers he has just received from the real estate agent.

If he is not going to end up as a good man, or a good father, and probably no kind of husband at all the way this is going, then the least he can do is cement his reputation as a bona fide member of the Grand Romantic Gesture Club. He thinks this might also be a reason why he misses Sam -- Sam would have understood this impulse. He would have mocked it (like Josh) but also thought it incredibly touching (like C.J.) but would also have wanted, secretly, but not so secretly that Toby wouldn’t have known about it, that the house was going to be _his_ bribe, his reason for agreeing, his pact with the devil he already knows pretty well. And Toby could have watched the fact of someone he knows for sure is in love with him, and not had to peel back seventeen layers of sarcasm, bad memories and pregnancy nerves to work out what the reaction is. Sam would have loved the house, and he would have been sure that Andy would say yes, and his surety would have made Toby sure, and then, maybe, it would have been okay. What you believe will happen, will happen. But Toby has never been brilliant at unconsidered faith.

*

Sam goes to California with the knowledge of Toby’s impending fatherhood glowing in his body, and intending never to return. He knows that Andrea will say yes, that there will be a beautiful house and children he will not be able to look at, and that even the stunted game of happy families that it is within Toby’s capacities to play will be enough to petrify his heart, stonewall it all around with the kind of masochistic jealousy that he will not be able to forgive himself. So he gets the hell out, before it’s too late.

*

On a night like any other -- temperate, still needing a blanket over the shoulders in Washington and warm at the back of the neck in California, sweat sure to gather there unpleasantly if blankets come anywhere near the equation -- Sam and Toby lie in separate beds and think about each other.

Sam thinks about the heat of of Toby’s body and how it was as good as an extra blanket in the crunch of a Washington winter. It is often aspects of weight and space and heat that he thinks about (that he misses) most: how the two bodies that they use between them seem almost to exist in completely different planes of life -- Toby’s weighty, opaque and dense: waiting to suck Sam in, and consume him, or batter against him, like the cliff wall to the sailing body; and his own body more or less ephemeral, only of concern to him when it is on the brink of being crushed or taken over or manipulated to any state more extreme than that of the vague apathy and uselessness he felt back at the White House. But he knows (or he suspects; he hasn’t exactly had time, or the inclination, to test this theory empirically) that if it were another body, even a body _like_ the one he is thinking about, the sense of imminent collapse and ruin, would not be present. This is probably love, again, or jealousy, or the mean dislike and resentment that is not hatred (because hatred is only the flipside of the other thing) which has crept into his feelings about Toby lately. He didn’t mind being used -- or, played with, which he knows to be the more accurate accusation -- so much at the time. But after the fact, it has really started to piss him off.

While he has a highly tuned appreciation of beautiful women, Toby’s brain, or at any rate his cultural indoctrination, has not allowed him to advance his understanding of the beauty of men. That Sam is, objectively, a beautiful person is obvious to him -- it has to do with symmetry and glossiness and, like a horse or a dog, _looking_ well bred. But he does not feel it. Andrea, for instance, can change small things about her hair or the make-up she uses around her eyes that make him think thoughts of mingled desperate anticipation and vague annoyance that it is this easy to fuck with him -- or get ready to do so. And, when he would lie on his bed naked except for his favourite tie around her wrist, wet from the uses it had been put to in other places, he thought maybe he only really understood the concept of beauty as it applied to her, so strong was the insistence of his eyes, and thereby most of the rest of his body, that this was the pinnacle of what good things look like. He does not -- did not -- feel that with Sam. With Sam, lust got a hell of a lot more classical on his ass, and the game was dominance and penetration, who wins the fight: just a continuation, through sex, of the arguments they had every day of their lives.

And yet flashes of Sam’s body exist in him, and rise up at inappropriate and unwelcome moments. The back of Sam’s neck, with his hair dark and wet with sweat, and the muscles of his shoulders tensed, and his own hand holding Sam in place, making white marks in the tan of the skin around his first few vertebrae. The way a ripple of shock would travel through him when they started, from the tender and almost mysteriously embarrassing cleft about the cheeks of his ass, up his spine, and finish around his jaw, and redden his ears. The way he, Toby, would occasionally want to kiss him where the blush flowed. The way Sam would jerk himself off, frantically, to try to match the pace Toby was setting. And the way he looked -- young, and horribly spoiled -- when he collapsed back onto whatever it was they were using as support that time, and invariably had some of his own and Toby’s come splattered over him, either on a patch of skin dark enough to provide near-photographic contrast, or on an article of clothing sure to stain. The way Toby would always clean him up -- mixing gruffness and tenderness because his own ability to communicate effectively was usually very much on the outs by then -- and the meek way Sam took it. Like he was looking for something from Toby, in small gestures, and didn’t dare breathe too hard, in case the ripple of his being in the universe upset the air currents enough to wave that something away forever, and blow him away in the other direction.

No need to be so coy: what Sam was looking for was affection. Consideration. Some reciprocal effort to acknowledge the way he feels -- felt. The same thing these imminent children will probably want; the same thing he will feel just as unable to give to them.

Toby lies in bed and thinks about Sam, and thinks about the quietude of the few minutes between their orgasms and their dreams, and how easy it seemed then -- so easy that he had forgotten all about it. He touches himself quietly, pulled in around himself in the bed, facing away from the window, and knows that it isn’t going to be the greatest come ever, but at least it will send him to sleep. And in California, in the path of a stream of cold water, Sam does the same thing, one hand on the tiled wall and one on his dick, and tries not to cry, because he can’t tell if the crying is rage or fear, or homesickness for a place he never lived in anyway: a warm space hidden inside a body that was never still; which he could never have held still.

*

It is the same -- almost -- later. After the kids that Sam successfully manages to look at for long enough to convince himself that he will not die from it; kids who love him and clamor for him in Toby’s ear when Sam has gone away again. After the dissolution of the Grand Romantic Gestures Club after its first meeting. Between the margins of loving Andrea, and hating her, and loving her again -- it is the same. Sam is there, and Toby is there. There is a mutual thereness which manifests in what are ad hoc liaisons during which they both understand that they don’t know what they’re doing and have agreed not to mention it.

Toby still plays the game where he sees how far he can push Sam’s body before it falls over. He plays a game with ice and warm towels and little bites that leave marks which don’t look like the impression of all his teeth, but are. He likes to spend an hour stroking Sam’s pressure points -- wrists, ankles, nipples, the insides of his thighs -- and then slap him in the face, pinch him, gouge and bite. He likes contrasts, and the way that Sam gets defiant, and then sloppily grateful all over his sheets.

Sam finds the violence arousing (and always did) but is still the same sucker for a tenderness done, either by or to the man he now occasionally allows himself to think of as his lover. He will, for the look of uncomprehendingly sweet bewilderment on Toby’s face, spend an hour with Toby’s cock in his mouth, learning it, mapping it, presumably so that he might find it again in the world’s kinkiest police line-up. Predictably -- he thinks -- it is the combination of dangerous, irreducible softness, the vulnerability of Toby so soft in his mouth, on his tongue and under his teeth, and then the painful hardness, also impossible to argue with, and so easy to choke upon, which it turns into that keeps him fascinated. He likes it -- loves it -- when Toby comes on his face, over his neck, or bubbles up between his hands and trickles over his wrists. That the dominance has increasingly become part of the game doesn’t stop it being hot.

They have the same arguments out again -- it’s just that Sam wins them now sometimes, too. And he doesn’t know -- neither of them do -- whether this is because he has gotten better at allowing himself to win, or because of the softening of Toby’s terrible need to be on top, both figuratively and literally. Nearly getting sent to jail can do that to a guy, Sam supposes.

Sam kisses him, and it’s perfect: Toby’s bottom lip fat and rich between his teeth, his beard sharp and painful, the pulse he can feel beating in Toby’s neck, against his palm, spiking, just a little. Sam always felt that he could get drunk on this body, drunk enough to die. And he still feels that: drunk, he sleeps next to him, sated and done. And Toby, who still doesn’t understand male beauty, is there, with a body in his arms that he has no idea what to do with, but which he holds on to anyway, rather harder than he expected.

There is stillness for them, and, for a while, it endures.

And, sometimes, the stillness hurts them -- reminding them as it does of how much sense this does not make, and what would be needed to make some sense of it. And sometimes the stillness holds them: Sam inside Toby and Toby curled around Sam, the silence telling the stories they don’t tell to each other, like how to be a good father, or a good son, or just someone who knows how to be loved. They don’t know the stories when they wake up, but they wake knowing that they have heard them, and wanting to find them again.


End file.
